Abstract: Given the flooding environmental information entering the cognitive system, together with its processing capacity limitations, a critical function shared by both attentional and emotional processes is to prioritize the processing of pertinent events. Although it is generally accepted that emotional stimuli can capture and affect the allocation of attentional resource, whether the processing of emotional stimuli is automatic without attention and awareness or depends on available attentional resources and receives top-down modulation is a long-term debate. Recent neurophysiological recordings with high spatio-temporal resolution reconciled this controversy by demonstrating that responses to emotional stimuli in the amygdala, a critical sub-cortical structure in emotional processing, contained both an early and rapid automatic component which was not affected by attentional and cognitive load and a later component that received top-down attentional modulation from fronto-parietal cortices. This functional integration in the amygdala supports the dual-pathway model of emotional processing.

Key words: amygdala, emotion, attention, automatic processing